Colectivo - Luis Marino Ortega

What a pleasure it is to enjoy Don Luis’s coffee again! Like all the lots under the Colectivo label, it comes from the San Agustin region in southern Colombia. 

Luis Marino Ortega has always harvested coffee and avocados. Today, he can draw on experience gained through the many challenges he has faced throughout his career as a producer. At just 16, he began his first harvests. Then, at 20, after spending two years in military service, he bought his first hectares of land and planted several thousand coffee plants there. But despite all his experience, Luis struggled for a long time to obtain a sufficient price for his coffee. After spending several decades selling his coffee as parchment on the local market, Luis began selling it to international buyers in exchange for a slightly higher price.

It was only after the creation of the Monkaaba collective that he was able to sell his coffee as micro-lots at much higher prices. Like the other lots that make up the Colectivo, we are very honored to present Luis Marino Ortega’s coffee to you. We owe this wonderful collaboration to our import partner, Semilla Coffee.

Grown at an altitude of approximately 1,840 meters, this coffee is made up of the Pink Bourbon variety. It is picked at full ripeness and sorted first by flotation, then by hand, to remove cherries that are overripe or underripe. It is then placed in the mechanical depulper for 12 hours before being mechanically depulped and dry-fermented for 30 hours. It is then washed 3 to 5 times under running water to remove the remaining mucilage, before being slowly dried on raised beds for 18 days.